The Jews, who had no wish to be suspected of not being among the candidates for execution at the time, took fright at this and conceded that Muratov might perhaps have eaten an apple just before or just after he received them.
At this point there was a movement in the group around Kochalov and the head director. The ‘double’ had pushed his way through the group till he was face to face with the director. He began to talk insistently to him with an avid, hasty look on his gaunt physiognomy. He seemed to have understood what people wanted of him and the fear of losing his bread and butter had brought illumination to him – now he wanted to make a suggestion.
‘I think I know what you have in mind. He is supposed to be a monster. Look, I tell you what we can do with the apples. Just try to imagine: I take an apple, and I hold it right in front of a Jew’s nose. “Eat”, I say. And while he’ – ‘now, you listen to this,’ he said, turning to the actor playing the spokesman of the deputation – ‘while you are eating the apple you have to remember, you must realise, that the fear of death naturally makes it stick in your throat, and yet you have to eat the apple if I, the governor, give it to you. It’s a friendly gesture on my part towards you, is it not?’ and he turned to the director, ‘Then I could just sign the death warrant, quite offhand. And the man eating the apple sees me do it.’
The head director stared at him raptly for a moment. The old man stood stooping before him, thin, excited and yet burnt-out, a full head taller than himself, so that he could see over his shoulder; and for a moment the director thought the old man was mocking him, for he seemed to detect a passing, almost intangible scorn, something quite contemptuous and unseemly in his flashing eyes.
Kochalov had listened avidly to the apple scene suggested by the ‘double’, and it had sparked off his artistic imagination. Pushing the ‘double’ aside with a brutal movement of the arm he said to the team, ‘Brilliant. This is what he means.’ And he began to act the scene in a fashion that froze the blood in your veins. The entire studio burst into applause as Kochalov, sweat streaming down his face, signed the death warrant.
The lights were rigged. The Jews were told what was to happen. The cameras were set up. The take began. Kochalov played Muratov. It had been shown yet again that mere physical resemblance to a killer means nothing, and that it takes art to convey an authentically monstrous impression.
Former Imperial Governor Muratov collected his cap from the porter’s box, said a humble farewell to the porter and dragged himself off into the cold October day towards the town, where he disappeared into the slum quarters. That day he had managed to eat two apples and lay his hands on a little money, enough for a bed for the night.
The Job or By the Sweat of Thy Brow Shalt Thou Fail to Earn Thy Bread
In the decades after the Great War unemployment and the oppression of the lower orders went from bad to worse. An incident which took place in Mainz shows better than any peace treaty, history book or statistical table the barbaric condition to which the great European countries had been reduced by their inability to keep their economies going except by force and exploitation. One day in 1927, a poverty-stricken family in Breslau called Hausmann, consisting of husband, wife and two small children, received a letter from a former workmate of Hausmann’s offering him his job, a position of trust which he was giving up because of a small legacy in Brooklyn. The letter caused feverish excitement in the family which three years of unemployment had brought to the verge of desperation. The man (who was down with pneumonia) rose at once from his sick-bed, asked his wife to put a few essentials in his old case and several cardboard boxes, took his children by the hand, told his wife how she was to close down their miserable home, and in spite of his weakened condition, went to the station. (He hoped that, whatever happened, taking the children with him would confront his friend with a fait accompli.) Slumped in his compartment with a high fever, he was glad to let a young fellow traveller, a housemaid who had been sacked and was on her way to Berlin, take care of his children, supposing him to be a widower. She even bought them a few little things that she paid for out of her own money. In Berlin his condition was so bad that he had to be taken almost unconscious to hospital. There he died five hours later. The housemaid, a certain Fraülein Leidner, had not foreseen this eventuality, so she had not left the children but taken them with her to cheap lodgings. She had paid all sorts of expenses for the dead man and his children, and she was sorry for the helpless little mites, so, without due consideration perhaps, for it would doubtless have been better to send word to Frau Hausmann, asking her to come, she went back to Breslau the same evening with the children. Frau Hausmann took the news with the terrible blank placidity that you sometimes find in people who have long forgotten what a peaceful, normal existence is like. For the whole of the next day the two women were busy buying cheap mourning clothes on hire-purchase. Meanwhile they set about clearing out the house, though this now of course made no sense at all. Standing in the empty rooms, laden with cases and cardboard boxes, the woman was struck just before their departure by a terrible thought. The job which was lost when she lost her husband had not been out of her mind for a minute. The only thing that mattered was to salvage it at all costs: Fate could not be expected to make such an offer a second time. At the last moment she adopted a plan that was as bold as her situation was desperate: she aimed to stand in for her husband and take the job as nightwatchman – for that is what it was – disguised as a man. No sooner had she settled this in her own mind than she tore the black rags from her body, undid the cord of the suitcase, pulled out her husband’s Sunday suit and clumsily put it on before her children’s eyes, with the help of her new-found friend who had almost instantaneously understood what she was up to. Thus it was a new family that travelled to Mainz to renew the assault on the promised job, and one that consisted of no more mouths than before. Even so do fresh recruits fill the gaps caused by gunfire in the ranks of decimated battalions.
The date by which the current holder of the job had to join his ship in Hamburg did not permit the women to leave the train at Berlin for Hausmann’s funeral. While he was being moved, unaccompanied, from the hospital to be lowered into his grave, his wife was being shown round the factory in his very clothes with his papers in her pocket by his former workmate with whom she had quickly come to an arrangement. She had spent an extra day in the workmate’s flat – all this incidentally in front of the children – practising her husband’s walk, his way of sitting and eating, and his manner of speech under the eyes of his workmate and her new friend. Little time elapsed between the moment when Hausmann was committed to the grave and the moment when she took the promised job.
Brought back to life – that is to say, to the process of production – by a combination of fortune and fate, the two women led their new life in the most orderly and circumspect fashion as Herr and Frau Hausmann with their children. The job of night-watchman in a big factory is not undemanding. The nightly round of the yards, workshops and stores calls for reliability and courage, qualities that have from time immemorial been called manly. The fact that Hausmann’s widow was equal to these demands – she even received a public commendation from the management for having caught and secured a thief (a poor devil who was trying to steal some wood) proves that courage, physical strength and presence of mind can be shown by anybody, man or woman, who really needs a job. In a few days the woman became a man, in the same way as men have become men over the millennia: through the production process.
For four years, the little family with its growing children lived in relative security while all around them unemployment increased. Thus far the Hausmanns’ domestic situation had aroused no suspicion in the neighbourhood. But then came an incident which had to be smoothed over. The caretaker of the block often sat in the Hausmanns’ flat of an evening. The three of them played cards. The ‘nightwatchman’ sat there with legs apart, in shirtsleeves, a tankard of beer in front of her (a picture later to be given prominence in the i
llustrated magazines). Then the nightwatchman went on duty, leaving the caretaker sitting with the young wife. Intimacy was unavoidable. Now whether Fraülein Leidner let the cat out of the bag, or whether the caretaker saw the nightwatchman changing through a half-open door, suffice it to say that a point came when the Hausmanns began to have trouble with him. He was a drinking man whose job provided him with a free flat but not much else, and from then on they had to make payments to him. Things got particularly difficult when the neighbours began to notice Haase’s – that was his name – visits to the Hausmann flat, and Frau Hausmann’s habit of taking leftovers and bottles of beer to the caretaker’s office became a subject of gossip in the neighbourhood. Rumours about the nightwatchman’s indifference to the indecent goings-on in his flat even reached the factory and for a time shook the management’s confidence in him. The three were forced to stage a break in their friendship for public consumption. Of course, however, the caretaker’s exploitation of the two women did not stop, but got even worse. An accident at the factory put an end to the whole thing and brought the catastrophic affair to a conclusion.
When one of the boilers blew up one night, the nightwatchman was injured, not seriously, but badly enough to be carried away unconscious. When Frau Hausmann woke up, she found herself in a hospital for women. She was unspeakably outraged. With wounds in her legs and back, swathed in bandages, racked by nausea, but gripped by a fear even greater than could be caused by wounds whose full extent she did not know, she dragged herself through a ward full of sleeping women patients to the head nurse. Before the nurse could say a word – she was still dressing and, grotesque as it may seem, the spurious nightwatchman had to overcome her acquired embarrassment at seeing a partially dressed woman, something only permitted to members of the same sex – Frau Hausmann overwhelmed her with pleas not to report the disastrous state of affairs to the management. It was not without pity that the sister told the desperate woman, who twice fainted but insisted on going on with the interview, that the papers had already gone to the factory. What she did not tell her was that the incredible story had also gone through the town like a brushfire.
The hospital released Frau Hausmann in men’s clothes. She came home in the morning, and from noon on the whole quarter gathered in the hall and on the pavement outside to wait for the male impersonator. That evening the police took the unfortunate woman into custody to put an end to the uproar. She was still in men’s clothes when she got into the car. She no longer had anything else.
She continued to fight for her job while in custody, needless to say without success. It was given to one of the countless thousands waiting for any vacancy, one whose legs chanced to have between them the organ recorded on his birth certificate. Frau Hausmann, who cannot be accused of leaving any stone unturned, is thought to have worked as a waitress in a suburban bar, amid photographs (some of which she had posed for after being found out) showing her in shirtsleeves playing cards and drinking beer as a nightwatchman and to have been regarded as resident freak by the skittle players. Thereafter she probably sank without trace into the ranks of that army of millions who are forced to earn their modest bread by selling themselves, wholly, in part, or to one another, shedding in a few days century-old habits which had almost seemed eternal and, as we have seen, even changing sex, generally without success – who are in short lost and, if we are to believe the prevailing view, lost forever.
Stories Written in Exile (1933–1948)
Safety First
At a stag party the conversation came round to cowardice. Having had plenty to drink we were brimming over with wisdom. We served up almost every episode in our lives when our behaviour had been ‘somehow cowardly’. We realised how bad it was when others found this weakness in us, but that it was ten times worse when we discovered cowardice in ourselves. At that point somebody told the following story.
Mitchell was captain of one of those colossal ships that ply between Brazil and England, a so-called floating hotel. You must not, of course, picture these captains as the rough old sea-dogs of our grandparents’ days, standing on the bridge amid spray and towering waves, and bellowing orders. Mitchell was a big, powerful fellow, but in a drawing room nobody would have taken him for a sailor, more likely an engineer, which he in fact was. Or perhaps a hotel manager.
Now something very remarkable happened to him. Towards the end of a voyage, not far off Scotland, his ship struck a small fishing boat in fog – through no fault, by the way, of Mitchell or his men. But the giant ship, she was called the Astoria, sprang a leak and shipped water. The gentlemen on the bridge took stock of the damage and decided to send out an SOS. They estimated the time she would stay afloat as no more than an hour, and every cabin in the ship was occupied.
SOS messages were sent and two ships responded. To them the passengers were transferred.
While in London the passengers’ relatives were falling upon each other’s necks, Mitchell was having a rough time in the Transatlantic Company’s offices. He and his officers and crew had stayed aboard the Astoria which surprisingly, in spite of the forecasts, had not sunk. Nor did she sink in the hours that followed, but reached port without further incident.
Mitchell viewed the behaviour of his craft with mixed feelings, to say the least. He followed the state of the old tub and the progress of that water in the hull with real desperation. He was quite disgusted that the goddamned ship wouldn’t sink.
When he docked, his own family was on the quay to meet him – his father and his sisters, one of them with her fiancé. They had been worried to death when the papers reported the SOS from the Astoria. He was their support. Now they were very happy, and also very proud. They bored him to tears with their questions. How did you manage to nurse the ship home? Etc. Being laymen they believed he had performed an heroic feat.
The next day he went to face the music.
His hopes were not exactly high when he reached the Transatlantic Company’s offices. He had called for assistance from other ships too soon and without necessity, very expensive assistance too. But the reception that awaited him was worse than anything he had anticipated.
The owner of the Transatlantic Company was the great J. B. Watch, and he received Mitchell personally. He was by his own lights a lover of the truth and accordingly felt entitled to shout what he thought of people like Mitchell so loud that the whole office could hear. And coward was the word that came through the walls to the clerks, and from there it passed effortlessly on to the offices of other shipping companies, and to the bars and ship’s chandlers and wherever there were people who had anything to do with ships. Nor did J. B. Watch confine himself to shouting – what he said in a muted voice on the telephone about his man Mitchell was even worse.
Mitchell was sacked. The reason given for his sacking was cowardice, and this was tantamount to sacking him from the entire American shipping industry, not just the Transatlantic Company. No matter where he went in the next days and then weeks, nobody had a command for him. None of the shipping lines had any desire to take on a man who called expensive doctors, in other words ships, to ships that were not quite dead, instead of having the courage to soldier on and try at least to reach port in one piece under his own steam. For public consumption the reason for Mitchell’s sacking was that ‘he had lost his head and caused unnecessary anxiety to our esteemed passengers’.
The papers carried the story in this form, and it was read by Mitchell’s family.
To start with, as I told you, the family had taken an optimistic view of the affair. Mitchell naturally did not mention the row at the Transatlantic Company at home. The family had no inkling of his sacking and continued to live in some style. His older sister was preparing to get married, an expensive affair. Then the newspapers came out with the story and his younger sister’s friends teased her about her brother. Her fiancé likewise got wind of the matter and his concern showed on his face. He had not, as he informed his bride-to-be, been blessed with the goods of this worl
d.
Of course it was not as if the family now suddenly adopted a new attitude to its former breadwinner. They had always idolised him. But they could not really get over what had happened. They could not take it in, so to speak. They were having to watch their expenditure now too. Their tactfulness got on Mitchell’s nerves.
He had other unpleasantness to contend with.
He was half engaged to a young widow who ran a boarding house for sailors of the rank of petty officer and above, a certain Beth Heewater. She was fond of Mitchell, but unfortunately her work brought her into contact with seamen who took a dim view of Mitchell. They all had much to put up with from shipowners, so they might have had some understanding for Mitchell. After all, he had put the welfare of his passengers above his company. But unfortunately these people did not think like that, but rather as competitors. They thought they’d have a little fun with him when he came to visit Beth Heewater and went into the saloon to wait for her.
The ringleader was Tommy White, the captain of the Surface who had taken a few weeks’ leave because his ship was going into dock. He had an eye on Beth Heewater and he was behind the prank body and soul.
White got Beth to agree not to see Mitchell when he called, but to ask him to wait in the saloon on the pretext that she was visiting her mother. There he was joined by a few guests who commiserated with him over his bad luck and Beth’s protracted visit to her mother.